Fair Baltimore, the Beautiful City... Sort Of

What do you know? For five and a half years of my life, I lived in the Seventh Congressional District, which is the one that Donald Trump called a "disgusting, rat and rodent-infested mess," and "the worst run and most dangerous anywhere in the United States." Our fearless leader added that no human being would want to live there.

I am a human being, I lived there happily.

 To intelligent people, the world is far more complicated than it is to stupid people.

When it comes to intelligent people, the Seventh Congressional District has boatloads. Both Johns Hopkins University (my alma mater) and Johns Hopkins Hospital are located in the district. Many of Johns Hopkins University's professors live in the vicinity of the university, in some decidedly posh neighborhoods.

EXHIBIT A: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY and ROLAND PARK

The Seventh District also includes Baltimore's Inner Harbor. It was kind of run down when I first moved there, but now it's a tourist trap of the first stripe. Even the Baltimore Orioles and the Baltimore Ravens have stadiums in the Inner Harbor.

EXHIBIT B: BALTIMORE'S INNER HARBOR

This picture doesn't even do the Inner Harbor justice. It's gorgeous.

The Seventh Congressional District also houses two world-renowned art museums, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Walters Art Gallery. I've been to both, and they're fabulous.

But this is the stuff you've been hearing about that contradicts the fearless leader's rancid remark. I'm gonna get real here.

While a citizen of Baltimore, I had more than one memorable encounter with large rodents and many encounters with smaller ones. I left one apartment in haste due to the midnight excursions of a rat. My next apartment after that was visited by a mammal of the same species. Everyplace I lived had cockroaches and lots of them. (Daughter Fair has named them "scuttle boys," which I love.) But I'm a human being, and I didn't mind living there with these universal benchmarks of infestation. City life, you know? My kids live in Philly ... and they deal with scuttle boys, mice, and rats too.

However, it is indeed possible to find neighborhoods in the Seventh Congressional District that are dangerous and crime-ridden.

EXHIBIT C: YES, DONNIE WE ARE AWARE

I would like to behold a Congressional district that has no poverty or crime, where everyone lives a blissful, strife-free life. The Seventh Congressional District is not that district. There are neighborhoods I avoided completely where people live in desperate conditions. These citizens do not blame Congressman Cummings for their lot, however. They are proud of him. They know he is doing what he can to help them. They would not switch places with the caged immigrants at the U.S./Mexico border.

Living in Baltimore changed me completely. When I arrived there in the fall of 1977, I was a registered Republican who believed in small government and the possibility that anyone could be successful if they worked hard enough. Twelve months in Fair Baltimore convinced me that what the human race chiefly needs is a government that props up those less fortunate through sensible taxation of those who can best afford it.

Through a program in the Johns Hopkins chaplain's office, I tutored an inner city girl. She was bused to the university three times a week in the afternoons. At the end of the school year, the chaplain asked all tutors to ride the bus home with their students and meet the students' families.

My student's house had holes in the floor. The furnace didn't work. There were people passed out in the streets. My student shared her home with her mother, grandmother, and two siblings. Her father died of alcoholism at age 36. Against all of this, the child was trying to learn her multiplication tables. Her family was Caucasian. I can't tell from the map whether her South Baltimore neighborhood is in the Seventh or not. It's on the border.

Seeing how my little tutoring pupil lived caused me to ask, "Why can't something be done?" And that's when I became a liberal. Boom. Just like that.

I'm going to make one final point in today's lengthy sermon. Look at this map of the Seventh Congressional District:

EXHIBIT D: THE DISTRICT

Does something smell fishy to you? It's not the rodents or the infestation, it's the shape of this district! It looks like a dragon's head rising from a lake. This is a district that is the product of gerrymandering. Which the Supreme Court just upheld. Is there injustice in the state of Maryland? Oh yes, and it's the way the votes are clustered. Elijah Cummings can't do one damn thing about that.

To summarize in an intelligent way, Baltimore is a city with all the positives and challenges of any large city. There are pockets of lavish wealth and pockets of desperate poverty, and many many neighborhoods along a sliding scale that fit in between. There are accomplishments and struggles. Just because the sitting congressman for that district is tough on the president, that doesn't mean the city is uninhabitable. Insult by hyperbole is Trump's signature achievement as (not my) president.

Rodents? Yeah. I'll bet the White House has them too.